Review: China Miéville’s ‘Three Moments of an Explosion’

Even when he is orbiting somewhere in a galaxy too far away for normal human comprehension, the genre-subverting English novelist China Miéville is dazzling. His latest collection of short stories, “Three Moments of an Explosion,” crowds virtuosity into every sentence.

The stories — long, short, scraps of ideas, fully imagined almost-novellas — roam all over the place but typically start (to the extent that anything is typical in the strange world in Mr. Miéville’s head) with people going about their business, life humming gently along, no worries. A man and his daughter walk along the beach in England. A doctor prepares for a conference in California. A psychiatrist in Brooklyn talks about her work.

And then something turns.

Suddenly the man and the girl are watching, awed and frightened, as an offshore oil rig that collapsed years before rises from its grave beneath the sea, lumbers along the earth and lays eggs deep underground. Suddenly the doctor is describing how the bizarre symptoms invented by his girlfriend, an actress who helps train medical students — she says her hands look like ghosts’ hands, that she is vomiting up food she has not eaten, that her skin is calcifying, that she is breathing out more than she breathes in — are coming true in real patients.

Suddenly the shrink is crouched on a rooftop in Bushwick in the middle of the night, aiming a hunting rifle and declaring, “If you have to take more than one shot, maybe you shouldn’t be a therapist.”

After that, things skew so quickly into another dimension that even when Mr. Miéville goes too far, cramming too much into too small a space, you can only marvel at the suppleness of his imagination, the inventiveness of his language. Like his stories, his books — novels, comics, novellas — skitter among genres, magpie-ing elements from science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, traditional fairy tales, steampunk, horror and something called weird fiction, among others. In his noir detective novel “The City & the City,” he imagines two cities superimposed on each other whose residents are ordered, by law, to “unsee” each other.

His fantasy novels, including a trilogy set in and around the magical city-state of New Crobuzon, have the refreshing effect of making Middle-earth seem plodding and flat. There’s interspecies sex, for one thing. And who needs Shelob, Tolkien’s grouchy old spider, when you can have the Weaver, the multidimensional spider-god of “Perdido Street Station,” who speaks in verse and is obsessed with a web connecting everything in the universe? “Un Lun Dun” is a children’s book set in the fantastical mirror-image city that runs beneath London. The star of “Kraken” is a giant squid.

Image

CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Mr. Miéville is also a Marxist and left-wing campaigner who received his Ph.D. in Marxism and international law. His literary preoccupations include power imbalances, the abuse of citizens by governments and — in this book especially — the methods by which people are killing the planet. It would seem difficult to find interesting new ways of describing the impending apocalypse, but Mr. Miéville rises to the challenge.

In the story “Keep,” victims of a deadly epidemic become ringed by trenches — depressions suddenly erupting in the earth — if they remain still for too long. In “Polynia,” Londoners grapple with the sudden appearance of a flotilla of icebergs that waft in the air above the city. In “The Condition of New Death,” corpses swivel around, for no apparent reason, so that their feet always point toward whoever looks at them.

Some of my favorite stories in the book are straight-up horror tales reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe or the recent movie “The Babadook.” “Sacken” is a sharp little tale about a young woman subjected for an unknown reason to a horrible ancient punishment, first laid out in Justinian law, involving a sack, a bunch of animals and a body of water.

In “The Rabbet,” an empty picture frame curdles and poisons everything placed inside it: “Goodnight Moon” becomes a story about “the universe closing on a sick void,” three smiley girls in a toothpaste ad suddenly want “to do something bad,” Mr. Miéville writes. “The one on the right would hit a woman with a brick. The last, in a bright zigzag jumper, would put spikes in strangers’ shoes and fly through the night over her small town with her teeth dripping spit.”

A chilling story called “The 9th Technique” — the title is a reference to the 10 techniques laid out as acceptable forms of interrogation in a United States government memo on torture in 2002 — imagines that a black market has arisen in objects that were used to question suspects during the Iraq war. (The most precious is the cloth used in the first recorded waterboarding.) Somehow these artifacts have acquired magical powers that can be animated if the conjurer recites the memo.

“You do not list 10 techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation,” Mr. Miéville writes.

I did not love all the stories. Some were so abstruse, so erudite, that I had a hard time keeping up. Mr. Miéville knows high culture, low culture, history, how to spell “anagnorisis” and “integument,” how to use phrases like “radical aesthetic democracy” in a sentence and what the Book of Thoth is. It’s not that he’s trying to show off — if anything, it feels as if he has so much to say that he is limited by the words and forms of thinking available to him — but occasionally I thought he was too smart for me.

He can’t help impressing, though. There are things to admire in every story, even the ones you can’t quite grasp. The book left me feeling unsettled, uneasy, nervous, and I think that is Mr. Miéville’s point. He wants to draw attention to the scratching under the floorboards, the panic in our heads, the rebellion of nature and inanimate objects. As he says, “These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city.”

THREE MOMENTS OF AN EXPLOSION

By China Miéville

382 pages. Del Rey. $27.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Watch Out for Icebergs and Corpses. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe